Issue No. 11: The Chat OS, $10M, the NFL, and Burberry

A LAST WORD: CHAT, THE OPERATING SYSTEM

Chat services have been dominating the news as of late. From WhatsApp’srecent more to end-to-end encryption, to Slack’s $3.8B valuation, to luxury advertisers betting big on Snapchat – the writing is on the wall. The NFL is the latest to bet on chat with a (cheap!) $10M sale to Twitter for the rights to ten Thursday Night Football games. Wait, wouldn’t that be Twitter betting on the the NFL? Only partly. Remember, Yahoo paid $20M to stream one awful game, earlier this year. The NFL basically gave the rights away in exchange for increased global reach.

Chat is the new Operating System and services, commerce, and a new form of television will continue to emerge out of formerly text-only services. The media and eCommerce companies who will win the future will do so by capitalizing on chat messaging as a platform for brand growth. You’ll see more of:

eCommerce Slackbots

Event-centric, interactive Snapchat filters

Customer-service powered by chatbot

Branded content-generated and scheduled to coincide with Twitter’s streamed events.

Content-mavens like ESPN’s Darren Rovell are about to become a lot more valuable.